189. Influence Is Your Superpower with Yale’s Dr. Zoe Chance

Welcome to episode 189 of the Brainy Business Understanding the psychology of why people buy Today's episode. I am so excited to introduce you to Dr. Zoe Chance, author of Influence is your Superpower. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business podcast. Today I am very excited to introduce you to Dr. Zoe Chance. She got her PhD in marketing at Harvard and has taught at Yale's School of management for over 10 years. She's done a TedX on how to make behavior addictive and and been featured.

On NBC News, cnn, the Wall Street.

Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Washington Post, Fast Company, and so many more amazing places. She is here today to discuss her fantastically awesome new book, influence is your Superpower which officially comes out on February 1, 2022. In just a few days I had the honor of reading this book early and let me tell you, you want this book. Hit pause, go place your pre order and come back to listen to the conversation. There is of course a link for you to make it easy within the show notes for the episode which are waiting for you within the app you're listening to or@the brainybusiness.com189 Once there, you'll find links to lots of other great related books, past episodes, some videos from Zoe's favorite magician, and more. Again, those are atthe brainy business.com189 now let's jump right in. Dr. Zoe Chance, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you. I'm super excited to be here.

Absolutely. And we are definitely getting into lots of great stuff from your new book. And before we do that though, I always like to have our guests introduce themselves. So if you can tell everyone a little bit about you and how you got into this wonderful world of behavioral science.

Sure. So I teach at Yale School of Management and the book that I wrote is based on the course that I teach, which is technically called Mastering influence and persuasion. But students refer to it as doing uncomfortable things that make you a better person. And I created. We'll talk about more about all of it. But I created the course when I came to Yale to be the course that I wish that I had gotten to take as an MBA student back when I was at the University of Southern California. And studying entrepreneurship. I thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur until I met entrepreneurs and realized I did not have the chops for it at all. But I was a geek and so I was interested in understanding what it takes to make business happen, why people make the decisions they do. And I worked for a few years at Mattel as a brand manager for Barbie, getting real world experience before I then joined academia.

Yeah, and I really appreciate the similarity of. So I was fortunate enough to have Bob Cialdini on the show last year for when this will come out when he was talking about new and expanded influence. It was the number one most downloaded show of 2021. And so I know people are going to be excited about influence being your superpower and talking about your book today. And you know, from his background of spending so much time doing the thing right, doing door to door sales, doing cold call sales, being a part of it and learning in that space and observing, I think that I appreciate in your book and your story, you know, you talk a little bit about how you did some of that as well and that, you know, led to some insights. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. So when I grew up, I was very, not influential, super shy, very nerdy. And people would talk over me that I had a theory that my voice was the same timbre as the ambient sounds of the atmosphere. That's how nerdy I was. And I got into theater so that people would listen to me because they have to listen to you when you're on stage. And I remember auditioning for this play that promised everyone a speaking role and it was Aladdin and I was cobbler number three and my line was shoes for sale. I didn't shine. But I really enjoyed doing theater and I kept doing it and learned how to communicate with people and move people and connect with people. And then I brought those skills to sales and I did like Bob Cialdini did. I love him. He's one of my heroes. I did door to door sales. I did telemarketing and marketing. Marketing Ran little business before I went to the MBA program. And I would say the biggest, biggest thing that I learned from those experiences was that rejection doesn't kill you. And if you are not getting rejected, actually what that means is that you're playing small. If you're only asking for things that people are going to say yes to. You have a very narrow vision for yourself in your life.

Yeah, I think that's a great segue into your November slash. The 24 hours of saying no to Things and knowing that everyone has a hard time hearing no. I mean that just. We're kind of conditioned for. For that. It feels really painful, you know, whether it's a negativity bias and so we kind of hone in on the hard stuff or. I like the way you talked about the framing of when you're asking and when you're responding to a favor request, too, if you want to talk about that a little bit, kind of both sides. But this idea of saying no to everything, the opposite of that Jim Carrey movie, right?

Yes. And I haven't seen that yet. Yeah. So when we start this, the MBA course that I teach, it's like a boot camp class. It's seven weeks of very intense real world challenges every single week. And I'll brag for a moment, this class is the most popular course at the business school at Yale. And it's super fun for me to teach. We begin with no because of exactly what you said, Melina. That no is so hard for people to say, and it's so hard for people to hear. And if we can get comfortable saying and hearing no, we help other people be comfortable with us saying and hearing no and with themselves saying and hearing no. And there is respect and comfort on all sides. If we're afraid that someone else is going to say no to us, is that when we're asking, we have this needy edge that's repulsive. And it makes our fear of other people saying no to us makes them want to say no to us. And when we're not afraid of them saying no to us, and even when we make it easy and comfortable for them to say no, that we only want them to say yes, if they want to say yes, then they want to say yes. So there is a very interesting relationship between yes and no. And when we're comfortable saying no, we're helping other people be more comfortable saying no. And what we learn is that no can happen in healthy, happy, perfectly friendly relationships. And that it's not about you and it's not about them. It's just no to this for now. And we can always come back later and ask again.

Yeah. I think it's also so valuable. So I talk about. I say it's like. It's like how dogs can smell fear, that people can sense some things off when you're not comfortable with your own pricing or your offering or whatever it is. And so if you have that hesitancy, it's priming them to feel like they need to ask for a discount or that they don't want to move forward. Something's wrong here. And I really loved how in the book you talk about how it's the. Even the timbre tone of your voice, of raising it up a little bit when you get nervous because of how you kind of shrug. Those are such useful insights for people, for sure. And I really also love the no is a complete sentence and no, thank you is a polite complete sentence. Important point for people that you don't have to then justify it. You can just say no.

Yeah. And not just that you don't have to justify your nose, but it is often a good idea not to justify your nose. Because what I got to learn in sales training and practice is that the majority of sales training in a transactional sales kind of situation, like I was in doing door to door sales and telemarketing and things like that, is about handling objections. And it's all these ways of addressing all the different kinds of objections that someone might have. So when they say, no, I don't have time, then you try to address the time when they say, no, I don't have the money, then you try to address the money. When they say, no, I don't have the authority, then you try to address that. But when someone just says, no, thank you, or if you press them, they say, no, thank you, I'm just not interested. It's very hard to come back like a ninja and get past the not interested. And I find that a lot of really nice people, when we say no because we don't want to hurt the other person's feelings, we sort of make up some reason that's not exact. Like maybe the real answer is that we're not interested or we don't feel like it, but we say, oh, I'm sorry, I don't like, don't really have the time or money or whatever the other thing is. And then there's a whole rigmarole while the other person is addressing that factor. For us, that wasn't the real thing. But then we. It's easy to get sucked into. Okay, well, I, I boxed myself into a corner with this fake excuse.

Yeah.

It also just feels better. It feels empowering to just say no, thank you. And this is even so that you brought up the 24 hours of no. And November. I did a whole month of no, which was one of the most fun months of my entire life. Some Facebook friends joined me in November. And I practiced saying no to everything. Of course, I said yes to a few things, but I practiced saying no to Everyone I loved, all the things that I might have normally been excited to do, and definitely all the things that I was dreading and found so much space that I created in my life. And I had my students do a 24 hour no challenge where for 24 hours they say no to everything and everyone. But you have the sacred right to change your mind. You always do. So if your significant other proposes to you and you wanted to say yes, you're not like, no, forget it. If you get your dream job offer, you don't say no, forget it. But say your partner asks if they can. If you can pick up something at the store on the way home and you actually say, no, sorry, I can't. But then if you need to change your mind, you can explain and it's fine. What people are really surprised about is that the people that we say no to don't tend to take it nearly as badly as we would have expected. And that actually on the other side, most of the time they weren't expecting us to say yes. They were just asking. Maybe they thought maybe we would say yes, like, no, okay, well, I'll go ask somebody else, right?

Yeah, that's the. When most people, like you're saying, feel the same way we do, when the idea of asking someone for something is like, oh, I have no reason to think they're going to say yes to this, but I'm just going to go out on a whim. Like, I, maybe they can do that for me or whatever. But, like, well, we'll just see what happens. And when people ask us, we have this feeling of, oh, my gosh, they're gonna hate me. They're gonna be so mad I have to do it. Our entire relationship is lost because, you know, I said no to picking up cilantro at the store, Right?

People will tell us, like, go ahead and ask. The worst thing they can say is no. Right? So you can tell yourself, that's right. The worst thing that they can say is no, I'll live. I'll be totally fine. But on the other side, just like you're saying, we feel like, oh, my God, the worst thing I could say is no. Right? How could I possibly reject that person? And we. Part of the reason that I've written this book and that I teach these courses is to help people disentangle the request from the relationship. Because they're very separate things. And nobody's going to dislike you for asking for something or for rejecting a request if you do it in a warm way. They're just not going to dislike you.

Right?

Yeah.

Yes. And if they do, then, you know, maybe that's something about them and you can just say no to the rest of everything there. But that's.

There you go.

That's another story.

Yeah, some.

Some relationships you definitely need to say yes.

Sorry, Say no to yes for sure. So one thing that I really love about the book and I don't know how many other people have asked you this or if it's just something that exists for them and then it doesn't come up. So I really love all the nods to other books and stories in your chapter titles. So I made some notes here of. We have the title of a chapter called Defense against the Dark Arts, another called Angels and Demons, the life changing magic of a Simple frame and even that. So as an aside, you have also I'm curious on the chapters of being like two and then two and a half versus just two, three, four. So that is an interesting decision. And then I love. I don't know if it's all just so you could have a chapter nine and three quarters, but I love and appreciate that as well. So this kind of framework of the book is so interesting. I would love to hear more about those choices.

Thank you. So mostly it was just me having fun with myself and enjoying writing it on both of those questions, the chapter title titles and then the half chapters and then ending it on chapter nine and three quarters. And listeners who get it will get it and listeners who don't. Don't worry about it.

Oh, we talk about Harry Potter here a lot. It's cool.

You do? Okay.

I'm a huge Harry Potter nerd. I made Katie Milkman talk to me about Harry Potter on the show too. So it's all good.

Obviously I am too. And actually something I want to share about Harry Potter that other Harry Potter fans will really like. But the reason that I kept the half chapters and the three quarter chapter is logistically it works nicely to have tiny chapters in between the longer ones. From an experiential perspective where people tend to judge their repeated experiences by the average way that they felt or their average experience. Right. So if you have shorter chapters between your longer ones rather than a smaller number of long chapters, the book feels easier to read so you get more momentum going through. And I also wanted those short chapters to be shareable with other people. Like say you had someone who is negotiating woman friend negotiating and you wanted to share with her the chapter that's about women negotiating and she's going to be inspired to Go and do her thing. The reason that I chose to frame the chapters just like. And by the way nobody's asked about it to frame the chapters echoing some other people's work is I have a whole chapter on framing. And I know you write about framing too and you probably speak about it as well, that we're setting people's expectations and influencing their experiences by the names and the frames that we give. Right. So if the like, the framing chapter itself is called the Life Changing Magic of a Simple Frame, which is obviously me echoing Life Changing Magic of Tidying up this amazing book by Marie Kondo that never should have been read by anyone who's normal and not ocd.

Yeah.

Because it's about house cleaning. Right. But her use of framing was so masterful that she writes she has a super compelling frame for a book on house cleaning. And over 30 million people around the world have now read it and she has a television show and all this. So when I echo Marie Kondo life Changing Magic of. Then someone who has experience with that book will get like a little bit of the jollys right. Or Harry Potter fan. And there are a number of different Harry Potter oblique references in the book. And if you have that frame of reference yourself, then you get a little bit of feel of the magic. And chapter nine and three quarters is the entry to the magical realm of the rest of your life. So that was the idea.

I love it, love it, love it. And I think it's. It's a little bit of. So for those who are maybe picking up with when you were talking about there. So we've got kind of like a peak end rules, surprise and delight mix in the way that you are framing. And I would say priming too for the experience that they're going to have with the book and that level of thoughtfulness. And whether we would call it like whimsy or wittiness like Dan Gingis talked about when he was on the show, is when you see that level of differentiation, it shows that you put more into the book than maybe others have. And it sets up for a whole different experience just even in the way people are going to read it. So I think it's just a really smart choice.

Thank you. And I don't know if I put more into it than other people, but I had a different approach and I wanted to readers to have reinforced the idea that you don't have to do things the way that everybody is doing them. And you can question all of the norms and all of the rules and do the thing that feels good and fun to you. And if you are having fun, the other person is likely to be having fun as well.

Right. And people can find that they will either relate to that like I do or they'll go eh. And then they can. But they can put it down and not waste if they're not a fit for the book.

And. And that's helpful too. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Can I ask you about Harry Potter? Have you ever been to the Harry Potter studios in outside London?

Yes, I have. Have you?

Okay. Yes. And I actually wasn't a huge Harry Potter fan. I was a Harry Potter fan but not a huge fan before I went and visited them with my daughter. And it was one of the two places in the world I guess along with the Taj Mahal that left the biggest impression on me of anyone I visited as a tourist. And it was because of the amount of work that went into the magic of Harry Potter.

Absolutely.

And like you saw the in the Goblins and Gringott's bank and they're all maybe 100 characters who you barely see for a second on the screen as the main characters are going through Gringott's Bank. And this is just indicative of the level of work that went into everything. But these masks for the Goblin characters had hand stitched eyebrows. Every single one of them had eyebrows that were stitched one by one by a human being. And I took so much inspiration by all the work that went into the Harry Potter magic that it helps me work harder to make magic in my own work.

Yes.

And I actually do reference in my book and it only gets like one sentence as so many amazing things do. But that I was really struck when we were there of all the oil paintings and they say so when you see the movies and there are a gargantuan amounts of paintings on the walls of Hogwarts and those are all they could have computer generated that they could have mass produced a bunch of random stuff. But they actually had people hand paint most if not all of those as oil paintings of people and it's cast members and family members and other things that are put around in fun costumes and stuff mixed in with other things. And it's just same, just amazing the detail and thoughtfulness that went into Harry Potter even From back to J.K. rowling. But then creating. There's a reason that you get totally sucked in and immersed into the world of Harry Potter when you watch those movies, when you go to Harry Potter world and the detail and thoughtfulness there just. And being able to do A tour like that for anyone who, if you ever have a chance to do that London studio tour at Warner Brothers, do it. No question. Do it.

Yeah. Even if you're not a big Harry Potter fan. It's so inspiring. It's, it's like an incredible art museum.

Absolutely. It's, it's super cool. So I love that. And I feel like I do have to ask, have you taken the test? Do you know like I would say like, do you know for sure that you're a Ravenclaw?

I feel like I did get Ravenclaw. Yeah, I did get Ravenclaw. Yeah, me too. Yay. Yeah, I mean I think academics kind of like we're sort of Ravenclaw. Yeah.

But I love it. So. Okay, well for the non Harry Potter fans we'll move on and talk about the next piece which we've already talked a little bit about the framing piece. I really though love the example that you give of the psychological illusionist Darren Brown. Can you tell a little bit about I guess that that build up in the lesson from him?

Sure. Darren Brown is one of my all time heroes and he knows more about influence than just about anybody on the planet. But he's not an academic, although he reads all of the academic research. So he is an expert. But he's a mind reader. He's a celebrity mind reader and performer, illusionist and he's an A list celebrity in the uk. He's very famous. He has even his own amusement park ride and things like primetime television shows and all that. And when he had his American stage debut show called the Secret, I was so, so, so excited to go. And by the way, I'm such a big fan that I went to the UK to see a Darren Brown show and before I got to do that I had bought a DVD player that could play UK DVDs just so that I could watch his show. So I'm a maniac. And in this performance when he first walks out on stage, he puts a table on the front of the stage, little table and a banana on top of it and he says watch the banana. Don't take your eyes off the banana. At some point in the show a gorilla is going to come out from backstage and take the banana and just call out. If you see the gorilla, call out and it's right there at the front of the stage. Like it duh, you can do this. We can all do this. But like you mo like I knew the Invisible Gorilla Experiment by Dan Simons and Chris Chabri. I was like, I got This I am definitely going to see the gorilla because I know how this works. And people who are listening, you should do this with someone who doesn't know about the invisible gorilla experiment. I actually just played this for my husband a couple of weeks ago and his mind was blown. Their mind will be blown. You're going to see the gorilla. But anyone who doesn't know that there's going to be a gorilla will not see this gorilla. It's called the invisible gorilla experiment. You're counting in the video in their study, you're counting how many times these players in white shirts are passing a basketball and they're players in black shirts who are also playing, but you're ignoring them. And this is how framing works, is it focuses you on one thing and which then is asking your brain, although it's not explicit, it's asking your brain to ignore everything else that's not this one thing directing your attention. So the friend that you show the invisible gorilla the video to at the end of the video is going to tell you how many times the players pass the ball and they'll say, you know, 15 or whatever. And then you'll play it for them again. And they will see in the middle, a person in a gorilla suit comes to the middle of the screen and beats their chest and then walks off. But they. And they can't believe they didn't notice it. So similar in the Darren Brown show. At some point in the middle of the show, Darren says, by the way, did anyone see the gorilla? And we look at the table and the table is empty. The banana is gone. And then, as I share in the book, Darren actually does it to us again with an even more spectacular reveal. Because magicians are. And magicians of all types are masters at directing attention. They're framing what we pay attention to. And by doing that, they make us ignore everything else. Because your listeners are nerd. They'll be interested to know that our mind, our eyes can only see in fine detail what's on 1%. Actually, no, it's 1/10 of 1% of our retina is in fine detail. And then everything else is sort of blurry and our mind is just guessing at it. And so for behavioral science enthusiasts, this is a good metaphor for how our brain makes decisions. We can focus system 2. Conscious mind can focus on one specific thing at a time, and we just don't have the mental bandwidth to take in everything in fine detail. And we're just taking shortcuts and guessing at the rest of it.

Right. I had a Student at one point that shared with me a video of Darren Brown that I'm pretty sure it was him, but that he was doing to pick what your favorite gift, like come, come into the the studio and we're gonna have a conversation about what your dream, ideal birthday present I think was, what he was doing would be. And he picked random stuff where it was like a bicycle or a gaming console. And the way he asked them questions, got them to. And so they had written something in advance and like sent him a letter about the thing they would want before they got there, like a week or so before. And then when they were there, he asked them these various questions about the thing that they wanted and they said it was the yellow bike or something, which he brought out. And then they looked at their note to themselves which said they wanted, you know, a Jeep or something, something totally different. But they were convinced that this was the thing that they had always wanted. Like, why would I have said that? I've. I, I'm so delighted and overjoyed about this yellow bike that I got as a gift or whatever based on the way he asked the questions. So really interesting. I will definitely be linking to at least one video of Darren Brown. And we'll have links for the invisible gorilla too.

Great. Could you link to the Apocalypse? It's available on YouTube so you don't have to have a Netflix subscription. And the Apocalypse is his favorite show of his and also my favorite show of his.

Ah, cool.

He persuades the friends and family of a selfish loser to to have him believe that the end of the world is happening and there's a zombie apocalypse. And he gets this guy to step up and be a hero in what he truly believes is a zombie apocalypse. And this guy, so you don't see when you watch the video, but I found out later the guy who was the selfish loser and then steps up as a hero in the fake zombie apocalypse completely transformed his life. And he becomes a teacher for kids with special needs afterwards. And by the way, all the people in Darren Shosi keeps in touch with them afterward, basically for forever.

Oh, that's awesome. Well, definitely that's what we'll link to in the show notes for sure. So thank you for those insights.

And as we are looking to wrap.

Up the show, do you have a top lesson like overarching from the book or what you hope people get from it or a favorite story or chapter we haven't talked about yet? This is your choose your own adventure, as we've said of anything that you would Love to share with the audience before we close out.

Thank you. That's so nice. I'll share super briefly, overarching message and then one concrete tool that your listeners can walk away with. I think that's how I can best serve them. Great. And the overarching message is that what matters in becoming an influential person is that people want to say yes to you and it's not whether you get compliance in any particular situation. So just set your targets on a longer term goal than just getting this one particular thing. And then the tool that I want to share, which I'll teach quickly, is the favorite tool of a lot of people who come through my workshops and classes. And it's called the magic question. I call it the magic question. And I'll share a quick story so that you can listeners can remember this and be able to use it. And this was the story that Gloria Steinem told when she came to my hometown of New Haven a few years ago. She's an American feminist and she was working on the problem of sex trafficking. She had become an expert. She was speaking, she was writing about it. She'd gone to a conference in Zambia. And after the conference, she visits this village in a rural area middle of nowhere, near a game preserve where three young women had been lost to sex trafficking in the previous year. They had disappeared, never heard from again. And Gloria Steinem asks the magic question of this group of women sitting on a tarp in the middle of a barren field. She says, what would it take for no girls and women to leave the village and be lost to sex trafficking ever again? And they told her, an electric fence. An electric fence. They said, when the corn reaches a certain height, the elephants come and they eat it. And we have nothing. We have nothing to eat. We have no money to send our kids to school. Gloria Steinem goes back home, she raises a few thousand dollars. She sends it to the village. By the way, she had asked the women, are you going to do the work if I raise the money? They had already committed and said yes. She sends a few thousand dollars to this village for the fence, and when she comes back a couple of years later, there is a bu crop of corn and no girls or women have been sex trafficked. The magic question is what would it take? And it's magic because it's respectful. It is acknowledging that the other person is the expert on their obstacles, on the situation. They know a lot of things you don't like. You could never have known that this is an elephant problem rather than a sex trafficking problem or even just a poverty problem. And it's also a question that shifts their mindset from resistance to influence or judgment about do I want this thing? Do I want to let them influence me? To collaborative problem solving. Okay, how could it happen? It's magic because there's often so little that you need to do compared to what you might have expected. Sometimes they'll take the whole responsibility themselves, or sometimes it's out of your hands and then it's finally magic because when the other person tells you what it would take, they're implicitly committing to supporting that outcome. If you follow the roadmap. So you get this information you didn't have and you know what it would take when you come back and you say, like, let's say you've gone to your boss and said, what would it take for me to get to the top of the salary band or the next step in my career? They'll be so happy to give you the math. This is what it would take. And then when you come back and say, okay, great, this is what you said needed to happen, and here's how I've done. X, Y and Z. Your boss, absolutely, unless they're a total jerk, will want to support you and will go ask for the raise, the promotion on your behalf and will do for you the best that they can. So what would it take? Is a magic question. And you can use it with almost anyone in almost any situation. And you can even use it again and again, even with people you've taught it to. And they'll laugh and they'll be like, oh, Zoe, the magic question again. Or they'll use it with you, but because it's respectful and it's collaborative, it works.

Yeah, for sure. I. I'm a big fan of questions and using them to help make sure you're solving the right problem, which I talk about a lot on the show and in my book and whatnot. So I love that one. Another really great one that people can read. You know, pick up your copy of Influences your superpower so you can read more about implementation intentions as well. So asking, so when and how are you going to do that? And why? That's another not maybe not the magic question, but another very powerful one that can help in getting things done and having more influence.

Super powerful. Thank you. And readers who might be considering this book and wondering, how does this fit in with all of these other great books on behavioral economics and all these different tools that we can use for influence? This one is a. If you want it to be. It's a personal journey of transformation to becoming someone that people want to say yes to.

Absolutely. And so for everyone now who is so excited to go get their copy of Influences yous Superpower, where what's the best way to get that and to connect with you, to stay in contact.

So the best way to get this is your favorite way to get books, whatever that is. You can find this book. But you can also find links and lots of other stuff on my website, Zoe chance.com perfect.

And we will also link to Zoe Bchants on Twitter so that people can connect there and tweet and tag you about how amazing your book is and how they have more influence and how delighted they are.

So thank you. I would love to hear how, how you use it if you do.

Yes. See that's the. I know I always encourage, you know, listeners, readers, let us know. What, what did you pick up? That was an amazing tidbit. Like I love the chapter convention. Right. Which, you know, did that resonate with you too? You should tell Zoe. Is there something else that you love this story, we didn't get into it here, but where I talk about on System one, System two, and then we have the subconscious conscious. I have receptionist and executive sort of thing and she talks about a gator and a judge which you'll have to read the book to know where that comes from. But if that resonates well with, you know, share about that too. A lot goes into creating books and I know that the authors are always delighted to hear that it resonates with someone. So if it means something to you, definitely tag Zoe on Twitter. We'll have that in the show notes so you can, you know, thank her for her amazing work and research. And I'll say again, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been a lot of fun to talk to you.

Thank you so much, Melina and good luck on your next book.

Thank you. Thank you again to Dr. Zoe Chance for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me there are a few favorite tidbits from our conversation and the book first, remember you can have fun in your work and break the rules a little. Zoe has half chapters with fun names like Defense against the Dark Arts, Angels and Demons and and the Life Changing Magic of a Simple Frame and Of course that 9¾ chapter for all the Harry Potter fans out there.

Yes.

These add some positive associations from those other books for those who like them. And she knows that from her awareness of the brain. But also remember that when you're having fun, people can sense it and it makes them more likely to be attracted to what you're doing, I. E. Making you more influential and interesting. So it all ties together and is.

Valuable with what we're talking about in.

This whole episode and her book. Have fun in your work days. Second, I love how Zoe says that no is a complete sentence and no thank you is a polite complete sentence. When you try to justify the no with a lot of extra stuff, it almost never helps things and often makes things worse. You don't have to be rude when saying no and know that while people are generally inclined to want to say yes to your requests so you should always just ask, they're also expecting you to say no or negotiate in your response. Most of the time it's okay to say no and most of us should do this more often. So I challenge you to take Zoe's no challenge and say no to everything for the next 24 hours. Practicing will make you more comfortable and you can blame us if you need to justify it while you're getting used to the practice. But again, just practice saying no without all the extra fluff and see what happens. People will push back a lot less often than you think. The last point I want to share is Zoe's magic question of what would it take? There are multiple stories of this in the book in chapter seven and Seven and a Half, and they're so powerful. One reason this works is because it helps naturally trigger the IKEA effect, one of the many episodes linked for you in the show notes. And as a reminder, those notes are waiting for you@the brainybusiness.com189. In them you will find, of course, a link to get your own copy of Zoe's book. Influence is your superpower. If you're listening when the episode comes out, you'll just catch the end of pre orders. But whenever you're listening, trust me, you want this book. In those show notes you'll also find links to related past content like the episodes on Surprise and Delight, Framing and my interview with Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book Influence obviously related to influences your superpower as well as ways to to contact Zoe, including her Twitter handle of Zoe Bchants. Speaking of tweeting, when you practice your 24 hours of no or try out the what would it take Question or just want to share how much you loved hearing her insights, give her some Twitter love and be sure to tag me as well she does great work and deserves to hear some nice things for sharing these amazing insights with the world. Zoe's on Twitter as Zoe Bchants as I said and I'm the brainy biz B I z. Tag and chat with us there and of course get all the goodies waiting for you in the notes@the brainybusiness.com 189 thank you again to Dr. Zoe Chance for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Next week John Listen, chief Economist at Lyft, is sharing about his brand new book the Voltage how to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources visit thebrainybusiness. Com.